Mozilla Firefox for Android (also known as Fennec during development) has now reached a major milestone, with the release of the Alpha version being announced in a Mozilla blog post today by Stuart Parmenter. Joining Firefox Mobile as it enters the Alpha stage are a few more features than had been previously planned for implementation.

Amongst these features is Electrolysis, a very welcome addition to the latest builds, which separates the user interface and the content loading on the page in to two different processes, ensuring that the browser remains responsive even if a large page is being loaded. Stuart Parmenter commented that

This Alpha release includes Electrolysis, which allows the browser interface to run in a separate process from the one rendering Web content. By doing this, Fennec is able to react much faster to user input while pages are loading or CPU intensive JavaScript is running.

A new rendering engine called Layers is also expected to be introduced for the Beta version of Fennec, and will “greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video”.

For more information about what’s planned for future versions of Fennec, you can check out Brian O’Toole’s preview from earlier this month. If you want to download and try out Fennec for yourself, you can do so by heading over to the Mozilla website.

John's been addicted to technology ever since he tinkered with his first custom built PC when he was 10 years old. He's also the proud owner of seven Amazon Kindles, but only because he destroyed the first six.